Asgard's Heart (11 page)

It faded away even further when the question rose
belatedly in my mind as to why there was an enormous mechanical praying mantis
trying to destroy me in the Isthomi's own back garden. The fact that it had
been able to make its grand entrance at all suggested that something was yet
again amiss in the state of Isthomia. If it was not, the Nine would surely have
managed to give us a little notice of impending danger, even if they didn't
have the heavy metal to nip it in the bud.

As I continued crawling, I began to feel that I was in
a uniquely awkward situation. I had no idea where I was going, and no way of
knowing whether the monster mantis was right on my heels. I had no weapon of my
own and was well and truly separated from Susarma Lear. The indigenous insects
didn't seem to want me in their underworld, and didn't seem to want to get out
of my way to ease my passage. Fortunately, I had every reason to think that
they were not given to biting, stinging, or otherwise being nasty, though the
repulsiveness of their touch made their company quite unpleasant enough. I
imagined that they were tolerated in this garish scheme of things because they
pollinated the flowers, but I couldn't help feeling that a tastefully designed
and suitably-programmed robot could have done the job more economically.

I got to a place where even the space beneath the
foliage became unbearably constricted, occupied by a tangle of what looked to
me like surface-lying adventitious roots. They fanned out from a central stem,
and I had moved into a closed V-shaped space, cornering myself. I had no alternative
but to stand up, and was glad to find that the leaves above my head were
fern-like, and that they parted easily. Unfortunately, their delicacy was
compensated by profusion, and when I was drawn up to my full height they were
still clustered above my head. When I looked up I could catch a glimmer of
light filtering through the translucent foliage, but could see almost nothing.

The insects were quieter now, and when I rose to my
feet the ones I had been disturbing with my snake-act decided that I was no
longer a threat to their sanity and well-being. They gradually ceased their
awful keening. I was able to stand still and listen.

I didn't know what kind of sound would be made by a
mantis-dragon stomping through a giant's garden, but I figured that its
progress would probably alarm the insects just as much as mine, and once I had
ascertained that there was no cacophonous whistling in the neighbourhood, I
came to the conclusion that I was relatively safe.

Because I wanted to see where I was, I decided to
climb a tree. This wasn't easy, because there were no authentic trees in the
place—merely overgrown bushes with limp branches. Nevertheless, the topmost
parts of the canopy, which extended all of ten metres into the air to bask in
the glow of the fifteen-metre ceiling, were borne aloft by relatively sturdy
stems, and I was able to pick my way through the ferny stuff to a stem bearing
a particularly solid leaf.

There was an insufficiency of decent footholds, and
the stem swayed alarmingly when I shifted my weight. The pain in my wounded
back didn't help, either, and I had a fearsome headache caused by a combination
of Shockwave concussion and screeching insects. But I managed to climb, drawing
on those hidden resources of strength that our bodies prudently save for
moments of terrorized hyperactivity.

When I got to a reasonable vantage point, with my feet
on one leaf-stem and my hands clutching another, balanced as safely as I was
able, I looked around—and promptly wished that I hadn't.

Big the monster mantis might be, but it obviously
wasn't very heavy. Its great long legs were protruding in every direction—I
could count ten of them now I could see the thing in all its hideous glory—and
it was moving three or four of them at a time, finding new purchase wherever it
could. It was coming over the top of the canopy, and it was already turning
from its previous path to head straight for me, having caught a glimpse of me
with its three remaining eyes the moment I stuck my head out into the open.

I wasted no time in clambering down—I jumped, half-
falling and half-sliding through the thick vegetation. But with the ground
still cluttered by the root-ridges there was no way I could hug the turf and
crawl, so I ended up in a furtive crouch, trying to step over the ridges as
fast as I possibly could, hoping to reach a space which I could share with the
inhospitable insects.

One of the great pincers smashed down beside me,
trying to stab rather than to grab, missing me by a margin that was far too
small for comfort. There was a tearing sound from above as the other grabber
began tearing at the foliage, trying to get a sight of me. I jinked to the
left, then to the right, trying to confuse any extrapolation of my path its
mechanical brain might be making, but it obviously got another brief sight of
me because the hand came groping through the vegetation again, closing with a
vicious snap no more than a dozen centimetres from my left ear.

The insect chorus was in full swing again now, filling
my ears with raw sound lacking even that elementary aesthetic propriety that
one might imaginatively credit to the last trump.

I stumbled over a root, but thrust myself instantly to
my feet again, and ran on as fast as my feet could carry me across such
disadvantageous territory. The arm reached out for me just once more,
unsuccessfully, and then I suddenly found myself confronting an open space—a
clearing where the only things which grew were no higher than the top of my
boot. It was star-shaped, and maybe twenty or thirty metres across. When I saw
it my heart leapt, as I realised that here was somewhere I could really run,
but almost immediately it sank again as I realised that it was somewhere that
the gargantuan predator could see me clearly as I ran, and get a clear shot
with its flamer.

It was too late to change my mind—my legs had already
carried me out into the open—but in trying belatedly to alter the direction of
my charge I turned my ankle, and fell, rolling as I did so to look back at the
thing which was looming far above me, its head seeming tiny now because it was
so high, its legs lashing out in search of purchase so that it could anchor
itself for one final, fatal grab.

I saw its swiveling head rotate and stop, so that two
good eyes stared down at me, and I saw the barrel of the proboscis come into
line as the arms pulled back, ready to thrust.

And then the thing stiffened, as though struck rigid
by some inner convulsion. A curious shiver passed along its body, and then it
collapsed, falling all in a heap like an unreasonably complicated puppet whose
strings had been simultaneously sheared.

I shielded my face as it fell, and ducked towards the
ground because I feared that it would fall on top of me and crush me, but its
loathsome head came down to one side, missing me by a metre or more. I stood up
again, and looked around—feeling slightly foolish, although I didn't know why.

Myrlin was standing on the far side of the clearing,
with something on his shoulder that looked like a bazooka with a slender, solid
barrel. Susarma Lear was by his side, looking uncannily neat and trim. She was
still holding the crash-gun in her hand, and she used it to beckon me urgently.

"Come on, Rousseau!" she yelled, audible
even above the sound of the insects. "Let's get the hell out of
here!"

I picked myself up, knowing that I was filthy, ragged,
and bloodstained, feeling as if I had just been stamped on by a giant boot. I limped
across the open ground. The news that my life no longer seemed to be in
imminent danger must have been transmitted to my hormone system, because all
the adrenaline seemed to drain away, and my limping gait became a drunken
stagger. I felt as though my legs had turned to rubber.

Incongruously, I fell over. I remember thinking, dimly
but clinically, that I must have lost a lot of blood.

Myrlin shrugged the silent weapon from his shoulder
and let it drop. He took three titanic strides forward and picked me up as
though I were a rag doll. Then he threw me over his shoulder where the weapon
had rested, and set off at a run.

Inexpressibly glad that someone else had finally taken
responsibility for my poor battered body, I thankfully blacked out.

6

Inevitably,
I fell straight into the grip of a dream.

I express it thus because that is precisely what it
felt like. It was as if something had been there, forming and growing according
to some inner process of its own, ready and waiting for whatever it was that
constituted the essential
me
to lose its
grip of consciousness. When I blacked out, it was as if a great cold pool of
darkness sucked me in and gobbled me up, consuming me more completely than any
mammoth- sized mantis-machine ever could have.

The sensation of falling didn't last long, and there
was no jarring end, but I found myself suddenly alone, standing on an infinite
plain as featureless as the surface of Asgard. The stars were bright in the
sky, and I knew that a cold wind was blowing though I could not feel it on my
skin. It was as though it blew straight through me.

I looked down at myself, and was unsurprised to find
that I was a phantom—a pale, glimmering, translucent thing. My ghostly form was
clad in a phantasmal tunic cut in a style which I associated with ancient
Greece, but the cloth was torn and stained with blood and I knew that I had
been mortally wounded by the thrust of some savage blade—a sword, or the head
of a spear.

I was dead, and waited for my journey to the Underworld
to begin.

There came to meet me, riding across the sky on a
great night-black horse with shadowy wings, a woman in

quilted
armour. Her hair was very pale, but there was no colour in her, and I could not
tell whether her piercing eyes were blue. I knew, though, that something was
wrong, and that the imagery was out of joint, for surely this was a valkyrie
come to carry some fallen Norseman off to the halls of Valhalla, whereas I had
been slain without the walls of beleaguered Troy, and was destined for a very
different kind of paradise.

When the night-mare landed beside me, and she reached
down her tautly-muscled arm to lift me up, I raised my own hand in protest, as
though to tell her to go away, but she only gripped my arm in hers, and pulled
me to the saddle behind her, as effortlessly as might be imagined, given that I
seemed to weigh almost nothing.

I had no time to discover whether I could speak my
protest aloud, because the huge creature launched itself forthwith into the
firmament, and carried us up into the starry night, where we grew in size so
vastly that the stars seemed mere snowflakes gently flowing through the wintry
air.

I looked down, expecting to be giddy, but there was no
particular sense of height—it was as though I looked through a godly eye which
could capture all Creation at a glance, and I saw what I took to be the whole
great world of men, which consisted not of one meagre Earth and a handful of
microworlds, nor even all the worlds of the galactic community, but something
immeasurably vaster, growing even as I watched in a futile attempt to fill the
limitless expanses of the infinite and the eternal. I was inexplicably unmoved
by the incalculable profusion of it all, but while I watched, and the winged
horse soared above the very rim of the cosmos, I saw patterns of change which
worked in me like pangs of anxiety and knots of fear.